Thursday, December 13, 2012

Plans for Poem-A-Day: the Unmasked Confessional

I have signed up to take part in a poem-a-day writing group over winter break. Don't shake your head wearily. Don't remind me that I had a lot more energy many years ago. I don't think I had more ideas in the past or more ease of creating or more notions about how to get the ship in or out of the bottle (wherever that metaphor came from). I think I have more now. I can turn to myself and pull something out--a thread, a handkerchief, my soul, a song, a frito crumb. I have hope in what has proved to be a vast well waiting.

I am always entranced at the outset of a time frame or schedule like this as if it were New Year's Eve--planning how my life will be different, more dedicated, my eyes never closing all the way, my mind poised to snatch at the impressions and shapes and ideas congregating, foregrounded in the head's temples, charging from one to the next.

I begin to avoid my desk for some days before. I don't want to put my eggs in a too-early basket. But maybe I could write something today and tack it in for day 11 when I might have run dry? Surely pre-writing is against the whole spirit of the thing. I must leap on each day of the month like a tiger ready to tear off a good poem.

Really, I embrace this idea as 30 days of being awake. 30 days of attending the paper. 30 opportunities to surprise myself. I don't expect a poem each time, but a useful nugget or an astounding freewrite like a white water cataract.

And I will have resource to some secret ideas and seeds. One of which is "coconut."

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